Investigating the 1980s Hollywood Teen Genre: Adolescence, Character, Space By Patrick O'Neill A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Kingston University, Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture. June 2016 Acknowledgements I would like to thank the following for their help, support and encouragement during the writing of this thesis. My supervisors at Kingston University, Chris Horrocks and Simon Brown, whose critical insights, guidance and suggestions kept me focused and motivated, and sometimes confused and frustrated! Other academic, admin and library staff at Kingston University (past and present) have, in their own way, been a valuable source of strength and assistance, they are: Colette Balmain; Stephen Barber; Will Brooker; Marissa Collins; Emerald Day; Ron Delves; Patricia Lara-Betancourt; Fran Lloyd; Matt Melia; Jane Nobbs; Alex Ramon; Linda Sheringham and Denise Thompson. Also, my friend and copy editor, Tim Gilpen, who did an excellent job of proof-reading my thesis. My close friends, Kelvin Hill and Claudia Mazzone, whose good humour and support have always been appreciated. And thanks to my siblings: John, Kate, Helen and Dan. Finally, the biggest thanks goes to my parents, Ann and Don O’Neill, who both sadly passed away during the writing of this thesis – this is for you. ii Abstract The 1980s Hollywood teen genre is a topic which has not attracted significant academic interest in the context of doctoral research. Only recently have writers focused on this period in wider scholarly texts, often positioned in relation to other periods of the teen genre, but not extensively concentrating on the 1980s. This research will address what is a lack of detailed analysis of this cinematic era and offer a contribution to knowledge in terms of Hollywood genre cinema. The aim of this thesis is to argue that teen films produced during the 1980s effectively represent youth concerns and the coming-of-age process, for example, in terms of adolescent identity, the different 'roles' the characters play, sexuality, gender, relationships, class issues and the generational divide. These concerns will often resonate with the wider sociopolitical and economic landscape of the Reagan era. The research will investigate these themes in individual films and then go on to analyse them using several films across the generic spectrum to show how the genre achieves a unity and synergy, despite differences in tone and attitude of the films under scrutiny. The films covered herein will be a selection from the subgenres of the 1980s teen films: the teen sex comedies examined were produced during the first half of the decade; the more romantic comedies and dramas were generally made from the mid-1980s onwards. Also scrutinised will be several delinquent teen films. One of the methodologies used to underpin the central argument is related to the structuralist theories and their binary oppositional factors. This will attempt to make sense of the portrayal of a youth culture by exposing its contradictions. This approach will be merged with film genre theories, for instance, in relation to a film's semantic/syntactic axis and the symbolic use of generic sites and iconography. Ideas relating to adolescence and its phases will also form part of the analysis. The principal conclusions from this debate will be that the 1980s teen genre is a topic worthy of rigorous academic interrogation, despite often being critically neglected and sometimes maligned. The genre has the potential to represent and articulate youth cultural concerns and wider societal implications, and the films therein should be considered important media documents. iii Table of Contents Acknowledgments…ii Abstract…iii Introduction…1 Themes and Issues…3 Methodology…10 Chapter Overview…29 Chapter One: Literature Review…32 Chapter Two: Coming-of-age: The Teen Sex Comedies...41 Teenage Sex Goes Mainstream…50 The Reagan Era and the Teen Sex Comedies…65 Embracing Capitalism and Rejecting Youth Countercultures…72 The Demise of the Teenage Sex Comedy…76 Chapter Three: Stereotypes and Other Roles in the Teen Romantic Comedies and Dramas…80 The Breakfast Club…93 The ‘Ideal Male’ and ‘Female’…111 Chapter Four: Propp’s Tale Roles and Narrative Functions in the Teen Romantic Comedies and Dramas…119 Some Kind of Wonderful…122 The Revisionist Teen Films: Heathers and River’s Edge…136 Chapter Five: The Teen Generic Sites and Their Spaces…146 Theorising Space in the Teen Film…147 The Shopping Mall…151 The Teen Bedroom…161 The Parental Home…171 The High School…177 The City…182 The Beach…192 The Car…193 The Dangerous Implications of Border Crossings…194 Conclusion…198 Beyond the 1980s and Further Research…205 Filmography…212 Bibliography…215 iv Introduction This thesis focuses on the so-called golden age of popular teen movies in 1980s mainstream Hollywood cinema. These are films about teenagers, from their point of view and played by teenage actors that were produced in the Hollywood studio system between 1978 and 1990. Much of the following debate will revolve around the teen sex comedies made in the first half of the decade and the teen romantic comedies and dramas that followed, which were generally made between the mid-1980s and the end of that decade. The delinquent drama, a subgeneric category of the teen drama, also forms part of this discussion, playing a lesser but still significant role. The thesis will argue that this cycle of films effectively engages with, and represents, adolescent concerns while at the same time embracing wider issues relating to the changing sociopolitical and ideological landscape of the Reagan era, which spanned his time in office from 1981-1989, under which the majority of the films focused on here were produced. While the study of individual films is a key part of this work, the research will identify and interrogate the differences and similarities between the adolescent themes and their societal implications in terms of tone and attitude across a wider corpus of films. The challenge here will be to address these issues within both the single film and the subgenres to reveal how the 1980s teen genre gave voice to, and articulated, youth culture, its contradictions and broader societal concerns. This will provide a coherent link throughout the films, their stories and characters, resulting in the contention that the genre ultimately works as a unified whole, in expressing these main themes and issues. Jon Lewis (1992: 2-4) shares similar views on this approach when he writes about the teen genre, noting that the films, 'narrativize [and] give order to...the otherwise fragmentary and fleeting, transitional and transitory…chaotic and contradictory experience of youth.' This method of study will be reinforced by a binary oppositional approach, drawing on the writings of Claude Lévi-Strauss on structuralism and myth. It will be merged with film genre theory, ideas concerning space and its symbolic values, and research relating to adolescence and the coming-of-age process. This interplay within the films will demonstrate the value of the genre in terms of its representational qualities. 1 Writing about the 1980s teen film will address a gap in the literature concerning Hollywood genre. It is a topic that has been neglected in major scholarly works on Hollywood film history, books such as Maltby's Hollywood Cinema (2003) and Bordwell & Thompson's Film History (2010) contain only cursory references. Similarly, key books on Hollywood film genre have few references to 1980s teen films, for example, Altman (1999) and Langford (2005). Books specifically on 1980s Hollywood cinema, such as Prince (ed. 2007), only make a brief comment on the teen film. Steve Neale (2007: 369) questions this lack of attention, arguing that the genre has a 'complexity [and] for many years been important to Hollywood, but more rarely it seems, to genre critics, theorists and historians.' Scott Long (1990: 156) notes in a broader context that the 'teenager is an orphan among cultural representation.' More recently, however, as the below literature review outlines, individual authors such as Shary (2002) have focused critically on the 1980s genre, while others have devoted noteworthy entries in books which concern broader approaches to the teen genre, like Driscoll (2011) and Bulman (2004). From a more popular perspective, the films still resonate with a certain generation today, including myself, who were teenagers during the 1980s. Several books have been written from a more journalistic and personal perspective, for example, Bernstein (1997), Gora (2010) and, most recently, Freeman (2015), all of which discuss the nostalgic values of the films. This thesis will be an extensive examination of a specific decade reinforced by a particular set of methodological approaches, resulting in an investigation into how teen culture and its broader connotations are portrayed through cinematic representation. Focusing largely on one decade will enable an in-depth analysis of a concentrated time period, where a distinctive pattern and style of film emerged. The films have the potential to offer a broader canvas to work with than previous periods, as one of the key elements of the thesis is the treatment of adolescent sexuality and relationships. The films under discussion portray a more candid and graphic depiction of these issues than was permitted in the 1950s teen genre, for example. Reinforcing this is Lisa Borders (2007: 25), when writing about John Hughes' 1980s teen films, who states: 'Though his 1980s movies were billed as comedies, they portrayed teens with a degree of nuance and an understanding of their complex social strata that were largely missing from the films that had come before.' Thomas Doherty writes that, while the 1980s films were targeted at, and were about teens, the 2 marketing and reinvention were 'emphatically adult' (2002: 196).